The Grand Départ is a French film directed by Martial Raysse, released in 1972.
The end of a meal like so many others: an empty-eyed couple in front of a television screen, immersed in a blissful digestion; then, break with the brutal and rapid arrival of a young man, and his escape by moped. With him, the director leads us into a "party upside down"; the logical order is reversed; the characters change their identity; they borrow their masks alternately from animals (the cat Cain), to heroes of mythology (Monsieur Nature), to famous paintings. The allusions to painting are numerous: Leonardo da Vinci, Millet, Delacroix and even contemporaries: Labisse and, of course, Martial Raysse (the director is a painter). The colors take those of the negatives of a photo: the blotters turn suddenly to green, and the mauves faded to blue; categories, ordinary determinations vanish into fluid and unexpected visual effects. These mysterious creatures speak of "great departure" and seek "paradise". This quest leads them into a kind of hyppie community where the dream has chased reality. They find themselves on a raft subject to indefinable cosmic events; the nightmare and the marvelous become inseparable. Cataclysms succeed each other; the fantasies, the hopes disappear, carried away in a stream of evanescent images that dissolve in confusion and disintegrate in horror! The big departure? The quest for paradise? With whom? Towards what? Since it seems, "alas, that there is no other paradise than that where we are". fade into fluid and unexpected visual effects. These mysterious creatures speak of "great departure" and seek "paradise". This quest leads them into a kind of hyppie community where the dream has chased reality. They find themselves on a raft subject to indefinable cosmic events; the nightmare and the marvelous become inseparable. Cataclysms succeed each other; the fantasies, the hopes disappear, carried away in a stream of evanescent images that dissolve in confusion and disintegrate in horror! The big departure? The quest for paradise? With whom? Towards what? Since it seems, "alas, that there is no other paradise than that where we are". fade into fluid and unexpected visual effects. These mysterious creatures speak of "great departure" and seek "paradise". This quest leads them into a kind of hyppie community where the dream has chased reality. They find themselves on a raft subject to indefinable cosmic events; the nightmare and the marvelous become inseparable. Cataclysms succeed each other; the fantasies, the hopes disappear, carried away in a stream of evanescent images that dissolve in confusion and disintegrate in horror! The big departure? The quest for paradise? With whom? Towards what? Since it seems, "alas, that there is no other paradise than that where we are". They find themselves on a raft subject to indefinable cosmic events; the nightmare and the marvelous become inseparable. Cataclysms succeed each other; the fantasies, the hopes disappear, carried away in a stream of evanescent images that dissolve in confusion and disintegrate in horror! The big departure? The quest for paradise? With whom? Towards what? Since it seems, "alas, that there is no other paradise than that where we are". They find themselves on a raft subject to indefinable cosmic events; the nightmare and the marvelous become inseparable. Cataclysms succeed each other; the fantasies, the hopes disappear, carried away in a stream of evanescent images that dissolve in confusion and disintegrate in horror! The big departure? The quest for paradise? With whom? Towards what? Since it seems, "alas, that there is no other paradise than that where we are".
IN. Not a good movie, though a prime example of audacious, rule-breaking cinema. It's an early seventies French film shown almost entirely in negative exposure, which in itself makes it worth a watch.
THE GRAND DEPARTURE (1972) was the only feature directed by the French painter and sculptor Martial Raysse. In keeping with the revolutionary spirit of the time, THE GREAT DEPARTURE has made a lot of progress. BEGOTTEN (1990) and the X-rated short THE OPERATION (1995), both of which are experimented with negative exposure (and far more effectively).
For decades THE GREAT START was thought a "lost" movie, but in late 2008 it made its DVD debut (in France), to alternately enchant and disappointed viewers anew.
We follow the cat man into a bizarre fantasy universe presented in negative exposure that reverses color values (black is white and vice versa) and written words. The cat man steals a young girl to heaven. "Heaven turns out to be a country chateau inhabited by several more animal mask wearing weirdoes.
There's also a cult hippie frolicking in the woods nearby. The cult's leader is an intense English speaking guru who prophecies a "Grand Departure" that will liberate his followers from their Earthly concerns.
Somewhere in here we learn the cat man represents death, as everyone meets him soon afterward - if he does not do the killing himself. An example of this one when he calls molests to a woman on a road and leaves her for dead.
The cat man winds up on a "raft of freedom" manned by the guru and his followers. The raft becomes a spell of interstellar flying carpet that whisks them all through the cosmos. The trip is having fun with the cultists and playing ball with the Earth (!), But it eventually degenerates into a mass org ... and the film finally returns to normal exposure.
The negative exposure works wonders, transforming drab Parisian locations into exotic dreamscapes. Of course it is not much for the camerawork, which is loose and amateurish; without the visual heightening this would be a crappy home movie. Nor is the acting anything much; the only performer who makes any impression is Sterling Hayden as the cult leader.
This film was created using technology Eastman Color Negative (ECN) is a photographic processing system created by Kodak in the 1950s for the development of monopack color negative motion picture film stock. Therefore, here is the original version of the movie and the second version with inverted chroma.
Director: Martial Raysse.
Cast: Sterling Hayden, Anne Wiazemsky, Gilles Raysse, Lucienne Hamon, Alexander Raysse, Jackie Raynal.